FIREBIRD
RAINBIRD

Telecomsoft was established in 1984 as the games publishing arm of British Telecom (BT). It operated three distinct labels: Firebird for budget and mainstream releases on the C64 and ZX Spectrum; Rainbird as a premium label for ambitious titles on 16-bit machines and advanced 8-bit platforms; and Silverbird from 1988 for budget re-releases of the back catalogue.

The catalogue is remarkable. Elite - the open-world space trading masterpiece by David Braben and Ian Bell - was published by Firebird on the C64 in 1985, two years after its original BBC Micro release. Rainbird brought Carrier Command (98% in The Games Machine), Starglider and Starglider 2 by Jez San, and the Magnetic Scrolls interactive fiction catalogue including The Pawn and The Guild of Thieves.

In 1989 British Telecom sold Telecomsoft to MicroProse, ending an extraordinary five-year run. The labels ceased publishing but their games endure - Elite spawned a franchise still alive as Elite Dangerous, and the Rainbird library remains a touchstone of 16-bit era design.

Elite (Braben & Bell, Firebird C64 1985) proved that a home computer could hold a universe. Eight galaxies, 2,048 star systems, a working economy, and no prescribed path for the player - all compressed into 32 kilobytes through procedural generation. It won the Golden Joystick in 1984 and earned a 96% Gold Medal in Zzap!64. Every open-world game made since draws from the same design well.

Carrier Command (Realtime Games, Rainbird 1988) combined real-time strategy with first-person cockpit action in ways that the genre would not match for a decade. The player commanded an aircraft carrier in an island chain, deploying Manta fighters and Walrus APCs while an AI-controlled enemy carrier pursued its own strategy independently. The Games Machine gave it 98% - one of the highest scores the magazine ever awarded.

Starglider (Jez San / Argonaut Software, Rainbird 1986) was the first commercially successful filled-polygon 3D game for home computers in the UK. CRASH Game of the Year 1986. The engine San built to make it possible was the direct technical ancestor of the Super FX chip that powered Star Fox on the SNES seven years later.

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